The Cogitator

liberal-life:

I grew up in a small Indiana town where diversity is hard to come by. Throughout high school, I think I knowingly encountered one individual who was gay (and none who were atheists). My opinion on those who are gay was somewhat apathetic…it seemed odd, I wasn’t going to stand up and vocally defend…

liberal-life:

OHIO HOUSE PASSES ‘HEARTBEAT BILL,’ THE MOST RADICAL ANTI-ABORTION BILL IN THE NATION

Moments ago in a 54 to 43 vote, the GOP-led state House passed Ohio’s “heartbeat bill,” giving Ohio “the most restrictive anti-abortion law in the nation.” The bill outlaws abortions if a fetal…

This is getting really bad.  They’re passing everything but an outright ban.  Where is the outrage and opposition on this?

In the age of the internet, physical paper books are a technology we need more, not less. In the 1950s, the novelist Herman Hesse wrote: “The more the need for entertainment and mainstream education can be met by new inventions, the more the book will recover its dignity and authority. We have not yet quite reached the point where young competitors, such as radio, cinema, etc, have taken over the functions from the book it can’t afford to lose.”

We have now reached that point. And here’s the function that the book – the paper book that doesn’t beep or flash or link or let you watch a thousand videos all at once – does for you that nothing else will. It gives you the capacity for deep, linear concentration. As Ulin puts it: “Reading is an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction…. It requires us to pace ourselves. It returns us to a reckoning with time. In the midst of a book, we have no choice but to be patient, to take each thing in its moment, to let the narrative prevail. We regain the world by withdrawing from it just a little, by stepping back from the noise.”

A book has a different relationship to time than a TV show or a Facebook update. It says that something was worth taking from the endless torrent of data and laying down on an object that will still look the same a hundred years from now. The French writer Jean-Phillipe De Tonnac says “the true function of books is to safeguard the things that forgetfulness constantly threatens to destroy.” It’s precisely because it is not immediate – because it doesn’t know what happened five minutes ago in Kazakhstan, or in Charlie Sheen’s apartment – that the book matters.

That’s why we need books, and why I believe they will survive. Because most humans have a desire to engage in deep thought and deep concentration. Those muscles are necessary for deep feeling and deep engagement. Most humans don’t just want mental snacks forever; they also want meals.

I’m not against e-books in principle – I’m tempted by the Kindle – but the more they become interactive and linked, the more they multitask and offer a hundred different functions, the less they will be able to preserve the aspects of the book that we actually need. An e-book reader that does a lot will not, in the end, be a book. The object needs to remain dull so the words – offering you the most electric sensation of all: insight into another person’s

I feel I learn a great deal from the internet.  However, there are some things, particularly in math and physics, that only seem to be able to crawl into my head via some quiet time with book, pen, and paper.

Very cool result.  Shows that the gap from being unicellular to being multicellular with division of labor is not as hard to bridge as previously thought.

Among the many ramifications of quantum computation for apparently distant fields of study are its implications for the notion of mathematical proof. Performing any computation that provides a definite output is tantamount to proving that the observed output is one of the possible results of…

Maybe.  But is it a given that interesting (or useful) proofs are long?  I honestly don’t know what the trend is in some branches of physics and pure math.